“Divide the world” sounds ominous. Here’s another scenario to consider:

Internet access is not really unlimited, but for many people with fiber at home, it effectively is and we pay a flat rate.

Perhaps by the end of next year, most programmers will stop thinking about metered access for AI? For many people, the cheaper models (about as good as today’s frontier models) will be good enough.

Which might sound good, but the downside is that it will also be easier to build an AI botnet without the users paying for it noticing. Particularly when people are running AI inference on their own hardware.

Hardware is still insanely hard to get a hold of, and the stuff that's being built doesn't really work for home use. Maybe if it crashes Nvidia will adjust the hardware flow.

My guess is even if the AI market busts there is still a massive demand for hardware as models are solving all kind of problems now.

But ya, lots of hardware everywhere not managed well is how you get sovereign AI.